Adult Swim
Sometimes Rick and Morty has an episode that isn’t so much about puncturing worn tropes or clichés as puncturing itself. We’ve already had that this season with the Story Train commenting on the nature of telling Rick and Morty stories and the Glorzo episode on the morality of the characters’ choices. The latest episode was called ‘The Vat of Acid Episode’, which is the first time the show has explicitly called something the ‘Episode’ in an episode title.
The entire story had several jumps back and forth about the ‘point’, which is itself something Rick and Morty likes to comment on. The episode revolves around the classic cinematic death of people dropping in acid, which is visually interesting while something that you don’t really see in real life — there aren’t a lot of big vats around for people to just fall into, even in the industrial factories where it might be used.
The visual language of this sort of death, with bones floating immediately to the surface, are so ingrained in film culture that the characters eventually comment on it as ‘Why else would the bones come up?’ in one of the funnier moments of the episode. It starts with Rick wanting to use a fake vat of acid in case things go wrong in their latest pointless adventure, which is lampshaded by Rick saying he’ll use the crystals to make more crystals.
But in the first subversion, the bad guys start talking about how horrible the deaths must’ve been and decide to just sit there for a while and just talk it out, all while Rick and Morty must pretend to be submerged in the fake vat of acid. While Rick has all sorts of silly counter tools, like other bones or fake ladles, ultimately it ends when Morty just shoots the gangster aliens.
After an argument about the stupid nature of the idea, Morty gets his ideal gadget from Rick — a ‘save game’ little button. It’s the sort of thing that you know won’t be so simple, and we get a series of amusing montages of Morty using his save and load device. Of course this must be subverted, so then Morty gets into a legitimate relationship with a girl that is never named nor do we ever hear her speak — everything is communicated silently.
It’s in the middle of extended, dark homage to the movie Alive with a plane crash in snowy mountains that Morty manages to choose to hold onto his relationship instead of reverting it — only for Jerry to accidentally press the button. Because of course he did. The final subversion is Morty acting like there’s a lesson about needing consequences, but that wasn’t the lesson — the lesson is that Rick is a sensitive jerk, because this whole thing was because he was hurt by Morty making fun of his acid vat idea.
Naturally the episode is most amusing when poking fun at the silliness of the fake acid vat concept, and ultimately it’s Rick and Morty commenting on how ridiculous some of Rick’s inventions can be and how ultimately super petty Rick can be about how Morty sees him. After all, ‘there’s always a vat’.
A note on the final tag, in a world where Johnny Carson is still alive and hosting The Tonight Show — I recognized the impression as the voice of the great voice actor Maurice LaMarche, who has done voices on the show before. I’d expect he hasn’t had a chance to do his Carson impression in a while, so that must’ve been fun for him.
Rick and Morty airs Sundays at 11:30 PM on adult swim.
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